The reason emissions exist, they continue, is not because 57 corporations are doing us down. It’s because 8 billion of us have a sharp eye for what produces what we desire. Therefore we buy these things.
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Somehow we have arrived at a place that the West never expected to inhabit. A generation after the collapse of the most powerful totalitarian regime in modern history, the “free world” has apparently lost its grip on the relationship between moral values and political decisions which was once its greatest strength. The idea had seemed to win out against all the odds: that a government could uphold fundamental first principles of justice, liberty and the authority of the law while still responding realistically to changes in popular opinion and social conditions. This was a truly miraculous understanding of the relationship between morality and politics and, difficult as it might have been to manage, it seemed to deliver the life most people wanted. It’s hard to believe but we might be witnessing the end of it. – Janet Daly (£) April 6th, 2024 | 17 comments
 At the very least, given the scientific importance of the CET, the Met Office could at least move the stations to more suitable nearby locations away from the disqualifying heat corruptions. But if adding near-junk figures to the collection is not bad enough, the investigative science writer Paul Homewood last year discovered considerable tampering in 2022 with the recent CET record. He initially found that in version one, the summer of 1995 had been 0.1°C warmer than 2018. In version 2, the two years swapped places with 1995 cooled by 0.07°C and 2018 warmed by 0.13°C. Alerted to these changes, Homewood then analysed the full record from version 1 to 2, and the graph below shows what he found. April 3rd, 2024 | 7 comments
The debate over censorship is maturing quickly. And the manner in which it is happening sends a clear message: the censors are losing the debate. They cannot defend what they have done over the last 4-plus years and now can only resort to forced silencing. March 30th, 2024 | 26 comments
First, we have got to a point where there is huge ideological flabbiness and confusion in the party. This stems ultimately from a lack of hard thinking. It has of course always been true, and famously, that the Conservative party is a broad church containing many different kinds of opinion. That is true, but it still can’t contain every kind of opinion. Traditionally, the Conservative Party has had within it a range of views on economic policy, from strongly free market to a softer bigger-state conservatism, but it was always anchored by a strong collective belief in the nation, in standing up for the United Kingdom, and in social conservatism. But this has changed in recent years. The accommodation to the trends of secular progressivism and liberalism, about which I shall say more in a moment, and the changes in the composition of the parliamentary party which this has entailed, have dragged the party to the left on social issues. There is now a strongly socially modernising wing within the Party which, at times, and on the fringe, veers into active support of “woke” values. So the Conservative Party is now all over the political spectrum, socially and economically. It is no longer sufficiently distinct from the Labour Opposition either economically or socially. No wonder strong conservatives are drifting away. – Lord Frost, discussing has British conservatism lost its way? March 29th, 2024 | 32 comments
Imagine going back in time, a decade or so, and telling anti-fascists that one day they’ll be doing the bidding of fascists. Imagine telling anti-racists that they would soon become propagandists for racists. Imagine telling those woke campus feminists, the sort who thought that being propositioned at the student bar was ‘rape culture’, that in the not-too-distant future they’d be making excuses for literal rape. They’d have thought you mad. And yet it’s happened. Many of yesteryear’s self-righteous haters of bigotry have morphed into the Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas – one of the most bigoted movements on Earth. March 27th, 2024 | 23 comments
I hesitate to jump to conclusion but… blood hell…
Opinions? Follow the initial link (this one) and read the whole thing. March 26th, 2024 | 17 comments
So too there is nothing in the New Testament that makes behaviour worse if it is directed against black people or gay people. Rather what is radically new about Christianity is that it treats all people as being essentially the same. I can find nothing in Plato or Aristotle that says that a deed is worse if it is done against this type of person or that type of person, nor do I find this sort of idea in Augustine, Aquinas, Kant or Mill. Ever single system of religious, moral or legal thinking that I can think of treats humanity as being morally equal. From this we get “all men are created equal” in the United States Declaration of Independence, which is one of the cornerstones of western thought. So not only has the Scottish government destroyed the objectivity of the law, so too it has destroyed the idea that we are all equal before the law. March 26th, 2024 | 18 comments
March 23rd, 2024 | 15 comments
As a Scot who grew up in the 1970s in the drawing rooms of Edinburgh’s New Town, the architectural manifestation of the Scottish Enlightenment, I am truly appalled that the legacy of Aikenhead and the Scottish Enlightenment – a historical event far more relevant to the modern world than the War of Independence of the early 14th century that so enthrals the SNP and its activists, an event which put Scotland on the map of the world and one of which the nation can be rightly proud – has been trashed by the Scottish Parliament and the Yousaf Government. From April 1st 2024, saying the wrong thing at your own dinner table, let alone in a drunken pub rant like young Thomas did, will once again land you in significant trouble with the law, 327 years, eight months and 24 days after Thomas died. Mr. Yousaf, his ministers and those who drafted and will enforce this law would do well to remember how history judged those who hanged Thomas Aikenhead on that bleak winter morning on the road to Leith. In doing so they should recall that this gross act of overreach and tyranny was the high tide of the power of the Kirk, power which was swept aside by the forces unleashed when the people said ‘enough’. March 21st, 2024 | 29 comments
For beneath the jolly hockey-sticks veneer, Mordaunt is herself an empty cipher for a Blob the Tory membership despises, but that its leadership quietly knows it cannot do without. She would do nothing to curb the current withdrawal of real power into closed cabals and permanent bureaucratic revolution. And once herself inevitably decapitated, she would be as certain as Sunak is to merge seamlessly with that ecosystem once again. At least, in the the interval, we might perhaps take comfort from the fact she looked good with that sword. March 19th, 2024 | 23 comments
There is something special about this government having enacted some of the most socialist policies of any UK government ever and still being loathed as right wing Tories. In doing this, they have alienated many of those who would normally vote for them and failed to attract any of those who would never vote for them. Hence they are deservedly in deep shit. March 10th, 2024 | 12 comments
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